What is truth,can we know it?

[mkirkpatrick]

What is truth,will we ever fully understand it.I think that to try and explain
truth,to talk about it,you are at once,caught in a lie.for truth is ever present
and forever now,therefore to explain truth,you are in effect,talking in past
tense,therefore a lie.
It occurs to me that,one has to become the embodiment of truth,to be truth
itself,then you will understand it.
It is said of old,that you can add to wisdom,but never to truth,for that
remains forever in the eternal now.

how then can I become truth?

regards,michael.

[Guille]

I used to think two months ago that truth was an impossible-to-advance theme in philosophy, because I had been a month trying. But then I read Kierkegaard and some Epistemology, from both I got a lot of ideas, and now I know that truth is a question able to fight with.

If you have read philosophy, you will know that philosophy gives lots of questions. It doesn't give lots of answers. People, wrongly, conclude that philosophy is useless and that it doesn't move. But it does. What happens here is that philosophy moves slowlly, it rrequiers a lot of thinking for avery little moves, but after many centuries, some things have been done on most questions. You must not go to the principla question directly, youmsut go through little parts.

For example, kierkegaard decided to fight with the different truths. He concluded that there are objective truths and subjective truths. Objective truths are collecions of information about facts from reality. Subjective truths are those that if they change, i.e. they become false, there would be a change in the being of a being. For example, for a theist, "god exists" is a truth, but a subjective truth, and thus, if this person discovered that "god exists" is false, he would change of being, he would be no more how he was, he would change.

Descartes' said that the only truths and knowledges are those of which you can be absolutelly certain.

Hume, Berkeley and Locke, beleived that truths were what you percieved from your senses.

There are many other philosophers and philosophies, you just need to read books, and you will get your ideas.

[Chaim]

Ah... "The Truth"

What a beautiful, intriguing, noble and possibly fearful and dangerous idea to contemplate and investigate.

There is little time for me to go into details, but it has been stated by several Rabbis that where philosophy ends, there Kabbalah begins.
The wise will comprehend.

[volantis]

Hi Michael,

You are using "truth" in two, entirely different contexts. In fact, there are two unrelated concepts here, which happen to have the same name. There is general dichotomy of true/false and then there is the absolute Truth, which completely transcends the duality of true/false.

If we are talking about the dichotomy of true/false, then things that are true are things that can be quantified at some level and things that are false are things that cannot be quantified. For example, you could never quantify 5 gallons of water in a one gallon beaker, therefore it is false that a one gallon beaker could hold 5 gallons of water at any given time. In this sense, science is the ultimate judge of truth.

Truth in the absolute sense is beyond quantification. Therefore it is beyond science. Absolute truth is both a subjective and objective experience at the same time. That which is known to be true would also be experienced as true at the same time.

We should have different terms to name these different concepts. That would go a long way to alleviate the confusion.

[Guille]

Volantis,

I agree with your separation of the two truths.

I agree that the truth from truth/false is to be judged by science (both natural and human sciences).

I believe that the truth from absolute truth is to be judged by philosophy. What do you think about this?

[volantis]

I believe that the truth from absolute truth is to be judged by philosophy. What do you think about this?

I agree with you. Although Truth as absolute is both subjective and objective at the same time, that doesn't prevent us mortals from wanting to acknowledge and understand it. Our philosophers come up with phrases like "the knowledge of the unknowable" or "beyond the beyond" to describe Truth. That is fine. Otherwise, we would not recognize that there is something greater in reality than our physical Universe.

Science describes this world of dichotomies, but philosophy leads the mind beyond the split and back to the singularity. BTW, the APM shows the singularity and its split in the unified charge equation. That is, there is a physics to quantify how the world of physical matter materialized out of the non-material singularity. The natural tendency for the two types of charge to reunite is seen manifested in General Relativity theory.

[Steve Hanson]

Truth is a measure of the distance between our internal model of existence and the way existence really is.
That implies that we simply observe existence and attempt to build an internal model of how we think it works, worked and will work.
To the extent that our model is different than existence, that is a measure of the falseness of our beliefs. To the extent that our model correctly describes existence, that is a measure of the usefullness of our beliefs.
Any other way of looking at 'truth' simply makes it more complicated than it needs to be and makes it useless.

[volantis]

Truth is a measure of the distance between our internal model of existence and the way existence really is. ...Any other way of looking at 'truth' simply makes it more complicated than it needs to be and makes it useless.

I agree. That is why I think we should call "absolute truth" something else. Empirical truth and absolute truth are completely different concepts.

Within the realm of science, absolute truth has no meaning. This is because science depends on having an observer and the thing observed. A philosopher tries to convey the meaning of absolute truth by using terms where the observer and the observed are the same thing. The only commonality between these two concepts is our arbitrary use of the word "truth" to describe both.

This mistake in language applies to other areas of science as well. For example, we use the word "mass" to describe both a unit and a dimension. A unit and a dimension are as different as a house and a brick. Houses may be made with bricks, but they are not bricks.

Dave

[Steve Hanson]

Nicely put volantis. Sorry I missed the other posts.

I guess my point then would be that as 'philosophers' express it, 'absolute' truth is completely meaningless and refers to nothing.

If we are just observers and not creators of existence, then perhaps the highest value that a philosopher might provide would be to define the relationship between us and existence. Us being the observer and existence being that which is observed.

In fact, shouldn't that define what it means to be a philosopher? Shouldn't philosophy provide a framework for science? If that is true, then a philospher should describe the rules of empirical truth.

[volantis]

Nicely put volantis. Sorry I missed the other posts.

I guess my point then would be that as 'philosophers' express it, 'absolute' truth is completely meaningless and refers to nothing.

That statement needs to be further qualified. Absolute truth is simply not the same thing as empirical truth. Empirical truth is concerned with the objectivity of things, absolute truth is concerned with the essence of things.

"The essence of things" refers to concepts such as love. I doubt seriously you would tell your wife or children there is no such thing as love. There is obviously something there that has meaning, but it is an essence, rather than an object. And that should even further clarify why we need to call "absolute truth" and "empirical truth" by different names.

If we are just observers and not creators of existence, then perhaps the highest value that a philosopher might provide would be to define the relationship between us and existence. Us being the observer and existence being that which is observed.

In fact, shouldn't that define what it means to be a philosopher? Shouldn't philosophy provide a framework for science? If that is true, then a philospher should describe the rules of empirical truth.

I agree with your view, but I must extend it a little further. There is nothing that says existence cannot also be observing us observers. As much as we would like to remove ourselves from what is being observed, it remains a fact that we, too, are objects of observation.

The philosopher develops the view of being both the observer and the observed. The scientist only develops the view of being the observer.

Both philosopher and scientist have their strength and weaknesses, each having the power to watch over the other. Philosophy is not above science, as the surviving ancient Greek literature demonstrates. But science is not above philosophy as modern physics clearly illustrates. Common sense must temper the scientific method, and the scientific method must temper common sense. Both are important in order to achieve balance.